Outing at Herbert’s Park
Herbert’s Park has been a fairly frequent destination to meet up with my team for work lately - it’s a lovely location, and a good place to spend the weekend. Thought to bring Womanfriend there for the Sunday Market as she hadn’t been there for a while.
The weather was excellent, we were still able to make use of whatever of a summer that’s left and enjoy a bit of the warmth from the sun.
D4, with its fancy houses and wealthy people, just exudes a feeling that’s different to most other areas in Dublin.
Halloween, Feral Children
Which brings me to a totally different topic altogether.
Womanfriend showed me a post of a mutual friend of ours, who had been attacked, again, by a bunch of teenagers shooting fireworks at her, just barely missing her face. She stopped and tried to reason with them, and got racially abused in return for her being Asian (she’s Japanese).
From her post, it wasn’t her first time being harassed. She’s been pushed off her bike and been robbed of it, not to mention being the subject of racial slurs for the last 3 years she’s lived here.
There’s a certain constituent of Irish teens which, due to their background and upbringing, act in such antisocial ways. There’s no reasoning with these people, and they are literally untouchable, just because of how the Irish justice system works with such minors.
While race is a recurring element in my friend’s attacks, it is just an easy stereotype for these animals to target. I would think it is more the fact that she is of a small stature, a woman, and Asian, all of which makes her deem like an easy target.
For all of more than a decade that I’ve been here, it is very rare in general Irish society for anyone to express racism overtly. In fact, even when I’m comfortable for folks to crack a few racist jokes at my expense when I know them well, most people would be mortified, and/or profusely apologetic, if their humour unwittingly deemed racist.
Perhaps I worked in circles in which people are from good mid-to-high social economic groups, and it is quite possible that I’m within a bubble and not seen what most other people had encountered.
But I don’t want to purely attribute this on just the social-economic standing. I live on the North-side of Dublin, right in the middle of all these working class folks and I can say that people in Dublin are decent folks, all in all.
But there are always some of these fuckers around, doing nebulous shits like that. I had run-ins with these once in a rare while, but I’m less likely a target, just because I am a reasonably sized guy, and they wouldn’t chance a possibility of a shellacking.
Having awareness of how the Singapore prison systems worked, I’ve always thought it was a rather harsh and spartan treatment to the lives of the incarcerated folks back home. But on the flip side, some of them had never made my life easier while I was in there. I certainly believe that if they won’t change while inside, they won’t while out.
Some of these kids are surely beyond education/rehabilitation, and in some ways, however the Singaporean justice system is derided by Western standards to draconian and harsh, there is a reason why. But here, the juvenile courts just seemed like a joke of the Irish legal system - I can’t understand how they think this is all going to work out.
Writing this, I’m just upset that my friend had to go through these, and it makes my blood boil that there isn’t anything she can do to seek redress about them either.
